In 1987 I met Gary Oldman backstage at Chelsea's Royal Court, where he was playing a corporate raider in Caryl Churchill's Serious Money. Oldman provided tea and cheese sandwiches, then let me watch his makeup being applied.

"Mentally I'm not in London at the moment, I'm in North Carolina working on Nic Roeg's Track 29," he admitted, Cheshire cheese crumbling on to his battered corduroy trousers. "This morning I discovered a shooting schedule in the mail. I'd been hoping the scene in which I assault Theresa Russell would be in week six, but it's the first scene on the first day."

Prick Up Your Ears, in which he played Joe Orton, was shortly to be released, and he explained how he'd "spent many an evening in curry houses drinking Guinness" to look "older, fatter and queenier", whereas to portray Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy the year before he'd avoided food.

Three years earlier, when he had been preparing to play a skinhead in Mike Leigh's Meantime, Leigh had asked him whether his character had ever eaten a Mr Kipling's cake. During one improv, Tim Roth had shattered a beer bottle on the ceiling, injuring Oldman, who – in character and costume – then beat Roth up. Subsequently driven to hospital, Oldman had begged: "Tell them I'm not a real skinhead, Mike! Tell them!'

Musing on the sustenance theme he told me: "Someone was eating chocolates loudly during the performance last night, so I gazed hard at him until he stopped. At the RSC, I ran out the back after a play and caught up with an eater as he came out the front and said: 'Never come to the theatre again' and gave him a right old bollocking."